Cemetery worker receives £65k in personal injury compensation

One cemetery worker was recently awarded in excess of £65,000 in personal injury compensation in the wake of sustaining serious personal harm after falling into the grave he had been preparing, work accident claim experts recently reported.

According to legal experts writing for the Sunday Mercury newspaper, the council worker – whose name remains unknown due to privacy concerns – sustained injuries to his right knee after he was sent plummeting into an open grave after a burial chamber collapsed. The grave digger was paid £65,672 in compensation for the 2010 incident, according to a freedom of information request.

It was also revealed by the newspaper that Birmingham City Council has settled 274 claims from 2006 to 2011, paying out nearly £5 million in compensation. Some of the more noteworthy cases was the Birmingham school employee who slipped and fell, injuring her back whilst walking through a dinner hall, netting her £100,000 in compensation and the £20,000 each awarded to a pair of school workers for two separate slip and trip injuries, leaving one with a fractured knee thanks to an icy path and another injuring her shoulder after tangling with the edge of a carpet.

One council spokesperson remarked that Birmingham, one of the largest local authorities in the nation, has anywhere from 48,000 to 55,000 workers over the period of time in question, meaning that only a small fraction of their workers had actually made compensation claims and that the amount spent on compensation was proportional to the size of the council’s workforce.